A
few weeks had passed and I was starting to feel comfortable in my new
environment. I had started to recognize the names of the streets that I used to
walk through, even if I didn’t know the meaning of those names. I had also
learned that I had to stop at the traffic light and make sure it was green
before I crossed the street.

A
few times, I had crossed the street with a red light and I had to run to the
other side to avoid being run over by a car. In my little town, the few cars
that passed would stop to let us cross at our own pace.

At
the same time, the visits of friends and relatives that did not live close
continued.

I
was under the impression that I had a multitude of relatives because the visits
were very frequent.

They came from New York, from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania and even from
Detroit, Michigan. They came to see the relatives, to meet them for the first
time or to see them again after twenty years of being apart.

They were always very emotional meetings. At first, we would hug warmly, then
they would step back a little to look us over from head to toe and would give us
compliments on our appearance.

Then they would
hug us again and would kiss us on one cheek. It must have been an
American custom; these compliments were very rare in our town.

The age of the
relatives was quite varied: some were very young like me, while others
were close to my father’s age. They used to call us on the phone before
they left their house to tell us about their visit. “How nice” I
thought. The telephone was such a useful thing: it was possible to plan
in advance, to get ready and to know exactly what was happening at that
moment even in a very distant place. There wasn't the uncertainty of the
“let’s see when I get there”. It wasn't necessary to wait for the mail.
Even when news came with some people who lived in the same town as our
relatives, nothing was as fast as the telephone. I started to understand
the deeply different life style here, comparing a little town in the
middle of nowhere and an American city. Sure, we were doing the same
things: eating, sleeping, waking up. However, in America everything
followed an order; it was planned and organized. Very few things were
left up to fate. The schedule was always followed: if you had something
to do at a certain hour, that was the actual time of whatever it was
that you had to do, not ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later. As
much as I liked the new life style, sometimes this rigid inflexibility
got me nervous. I felt like a prisoner of time. I also noticed a strange
custom in the houses. Every house had a big clock hanging on the wall in
the kitchen. They were cute; they looked like kittens or other
characters from the cartoons. The colors were the same colors as the
walls. At the time, the color that was used the most for the kitchen was
yellow. Even the curtains were of the same color. The strange thing was
that the clocks were always set to be about 10-15 minutes ahead of the
actual time. It wasn't a mistake or an act of negligence: the owners of
the house had set them up a few minutes ahead on purpose. When I asked
for an explanation, they said that since there is never enough time,
when you put the clock ahead you think you are running late and so you
hurry up to make sure you get to work or wherever else you have to be on
time. I didn't understand the purpose of it, considering that they knew
that the time was wrong, but that system worked out pretty well. I
thought about the clock of the bell tower. It use to ring every 15
minutes and we could hear the bells in the fields, all through the
mountains and in the valleys. When the clock didn't ring because it was
broken or because the time wasn't right, no one used to worry. It was
enough to look at the position of the sun to understand what time it
was, more or less. No one cared about 15-20 minutes of difference with
the real time. Only a few people had an alarm clock, but even the alarm
clock never indicated the right time. We, the “new arrivals,” used to
talk about this strange custom regarding the clock in the American
houses and we used to laugh about it, because we thought it was stupid.
But we didn't see anything strange with our clock in the bell tower
which very often would not work because someone had forgotten to charge
it. I was starting to feel more and more the differences between the two
worlds.